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AT&T Blanket Commercial — What’s the Song?

‘From the Morning’ was featured on Drake’s third and final album ‘Pink Moon’ before his death in 1974. The recording sessions took only two nights, with just Drake and sound engineer and producer John Wood in the studio. The bare yet serene recordings of the 11-track album lasted only 28 minutes, and featured only Drake on vocals and acoustic guitar (with sparse piano in the title track).
AT&T’s visuals were clearly inspired by the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ‘The Gates.’ The duo’s installation artwork could be seen all over the world, but ‘The Gates’ exhibit featured 23 miles of orange vinyl gates that were installed in Central Park; the exhibit ran in February of 2005.
Check out the commercial below, and tune into AOL Radio’s Songwriters station to hear this song and other Nick Drake classics.
AT&T Blanket Commercial: Rethink Possible Series
The artists behind The Gates Christo and Jeanne-Claude
At their studio in New York City, LX.TV host Shira Lazar talks with renowned environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude about the Gates Project, their artistic endeavors, and the challenges of living and working together in New York.
The Gates
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This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. (November 2014) |
The Gates were a group of gates comprising a site-specific work of art by Bulgarian artist Christo Yavacheff and French artist Jeanne-Claude, known jointly as Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The artists installed 7,503 vinyl “gates” along 23 miles (37 km) of pathways in Central Park in New York City. From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric. The exhibit ran from February 12, 2005 through February 27, 2005.
The books and other memorabilia distributed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude refer to the project as The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005 in reference to the time that passed from the artists’ initial proposal until they were able to go ahead with it.
The Gates were greeted with mixed reactions. Some people loved them for brightening the bleak winter landscape and encouraging late-night pedestrian traffic in Central Park; others hated them, accusing them of defacing the landscape. It was seen as an obstruction to bicycclists, who felt that the gates could cause accidents, although cycling was not legal on those paths. They received a great deal of their nationwide fame as a frequent object of ridicule by David Letterman, as well as by Keith Olbermann, whose apartment was nearby.
Contents
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Fabrication[edit]
Construction and cost[edit]
The total materials used according to the artists were 5,390 tons of steel, 315,491 feet (96 km) of vinyl tubing, 99,155 square metres of fabric, and 15,000 sets of brackets and hardware. The gates were assembled in a 25,000 square foot (2,300 m²) Long Island facility, then trucked to Central Park. The textile was produced and sewn in Germany.
As one of the conditions for use of the park space, the steel bases rested upon, but remained unattached to, the walkways, so that no holes were drilled and no permanent changes were made to the park.
The artists sold pieces of their own artwork, including preparatory drawings for The Gates, to finance the project.
They offered a cost of $21 million and the details are published in the Harvard Business School. Greg Allen and The New York Times attempted to itemize the costs and could account for about $5–10 million, given reasonable estimates for parts, labor, and costs related to the staffing of the installation.[1][2]
Installation[edit]
On January 3, 2005, work began on the installation of the project. During the week of January 17, the park filled with workers using forklift vehicles to move the rectangular steel plates into position all over Central Park. There were small signs placed on every walkway in the park with alphanumeric codes which the workers used to place the metal plates onto the designated spots.
By January 27, most of the rectangular metal plates were positioned. All had small orange plastic markers sticking up two feet (around half a meter) from each end, possibly intended to help people find the base plates if they were covered with snow. A major snow storm on January 22 and extreme cold hampered progress.
By February 7, many teams of workers, wearing grey uniforms, moved the vertical parts of the gates, and attached them to the base plates. The documentation describes the color as saffron but many local observers described it as orange. The attached vertical fabric pieces were 16 feet (5 m) high, with a crossbar at the top from which the flag pieces were unfurled. The most common width seems to have been 11 feet (3 m) although the width varied, depending on the width of the path, from 5 feet 6 inches to 18 feet.
Display[edit]
Opening[edit]
The project was officially launched on February 12, 2005, when then-New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dropped the first piece of fabric at 8:30 a.m., with Christo and Jeanne-Claude in attendance. The rest of The Gates were opened subsequently throughout the park and were completed within the next few hours with large crowds of people watching. Generally, the crews of workers who erected the gates were assigned to open them. They walked underneath, and used a hook at the end of a long stick to pull a loop hanging from the crossbar of each gate. That opened the cloth bag containing the fabric panel part of the gate. The bag fell to the ground, along with a cardboard tube around which the fabric was rolled. The fabric part then hung from the horizontal crossbar. By the afternoon of February 12, all of the panels were unfurled.
The project staff remained deployed in the park, patrolling, and replacing damaged gates. On many days, staff members distributed free 2.75″ square souvenir swatches of the orange fabric to passers by, in part intended to discourage vandalism. Nevertheless, one of the gates, near the Shakespeare Garden in front of the Delacorte Theatre, was vandalized and replaced frequently. The swatches remain highly collectible and trade on eBay for about $10 each.
Closure and legacy[edit]
The installation was set to close February 27, 2005.[3] Christo and Jeanne-Claude also visited the installation on the last day, entering Central Park at its less congested northern end. Although the Park’s roadways were closed to vehicles, they traveled with a police escort in their Maybach sedan. Christo then left the car and walked to several vantage points, capturing last minute photographs with a professional assistant. After the exhibition closed on February 27, the gates and bases were removed. The materials were industrially recycled, partially as scrap metal.[4]
A 2007 documentary film’s synopsis noted this artwork “brought over 4 million visitors from around the world to Central Park.”[5]
The HBO movie The Gates, about the installation,[6] aired February 26, 2008, won a Peabody Award that same year.[7]
Inspirations[edit]
The Gates alludes to the tradition of Japanese torii gates, traditionally constructed at the entrance to Shinto shrines. Thousands of vermilion-colored torii line the paths of the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, Japan. Successful Japanese businessmen traditionally purchased a gate in gratitude to Inari, the god of worldly prosperity.
Gallery[edit]
Views of The Gates | ||||||||||
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(See also: Media related to The Gates (Christo and Jeanne-Claude work of art) at Wikimedia Commons)
References[edit]
Notes
- Jump up^ ‘The Gates’ Bill. Greg Allen, greg.org, February 13, 2005.
- Jump up^ “Enough About ‘Gates’ as Art; Let’s Talk About That Price Tag.” The New York Times, March 5, 2005, investigates the $21 million claim.
- Jump up^ Central Park’s ‘Gates’ to close, a February 25, 2005 CNN story
- Jump up^ Beeson, Ed (April 28, 2013). “Behold the Mega Shredder: Jersey City recycling plant turns cars to confetti in seconds”. The Jersey Journal. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
- Jump up^ The Gates documentary film, produced by Kino Lorber, Directors Albert Maysles, Antonio Ferrera, David Maysles, Matthew Prinzing, cf. watch on hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/watch/380749
- Jump up^ http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/thegates/index.html?ntrack_para1=insidehbo7_text
- Jump up^ 68th Annual Peabody Awards, May 2009.
Other sources
- Stephen Colbert describes The Gates
- Cave Paintings and Christo’s “Gates”: Art in Individual Minds and Public Places
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates: Central Park, New York City, 1979–2005, ISBN 3-8228-4242-7: for pictures of the manufacturing process, early meetings with city officials, pictures of the completed project, design drawings, etc.
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude, ISBN 3-8228-5996-6: for pictures and commentary about earlier projects.
External links[edit]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Gates (installation). |
- The Gates on the Christo and Jeanne Claude website
- [1] 8-minute film for download: ‘A Walk Through the Gates’
- The Gates Photo Gallery
- In Pictures: The Gates – Extrageographic Magazine
- Geotagged photograph of The Gates – Panoramio
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Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Other artists that I have profiled are Marina Abramovic, Ida Applebroog, Matthew Barney, Allora & Calzadilla, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Jan Fabre, Makoto Fujimura, Hamish Fulton, Ellen Gallaugher, Ryan Gander, John Giorno, Cai Guo-Qiang, Arturo Herrera, Oliver Herring, David Hockney, David Hooker, Roni Horn, Peter Howson, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Martin Karplus, Margaret Keane, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Sally Mann, Kerry James Marshall, Trey McCarley, Paul McCarthy, Josiah McElheny, Barry McGee, Tony Oursler, William Pope L., Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, Georges Rouault, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Banks Violett, Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Andrea Zittel,
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